Lately, I've been paying attention to on-chain transactions, and the more I look, the more I think that "sandwich/arbitrage" is quite similar: you think you've found a bargain, but you might actually be paying someone else's gas fees. Especially in pools with lower liquidity, when the price jumps, what you really end up paying isn't just your slippage setting, but the queue of people and bots.

What I care more about now is whether there are people stacking positions near the pool's lending utilization rate or liquidation threshold, plus whether the same pair of transactions in the block is always being squeezed through by the same set of addresses. To put it simply, yes, opportunities exist, but most of the time what you see as a "spread" is just others packaging their fees and priority fees to show you.

These days, I've also been discussing the expectations of rate cuts, the correlation between the US dollar index and risk assets acting up together... When macro heats up, on-chain activity heats up even more, with more people rushing in and more squeezing happening. Anyway, I now hesitate a couple of seconds before placing an order—prefer to earn a little less than to be the kind of "I thought I was quick, but I was just expensive" traffic. That's all for now.